Brooklyn, Babylon, or Maybe Nowhere at All
At the corner
Vivienne, not her name
But she seems always
In my memory
A Vivienne, hands off money
For cartons of cigarettes
Smuggled nervously on trains
from another state
And later the couple who will threaten to kill each other, all night it’s like this,
Outside the bodega, right now they are in love
And the night is just starting
Later, there will be kitchen knives, no doubt
Recriminations too huge for their small hands
But for now they are dumb to all that
Glowing, practically radioactive
And the moon is just there like a fact
If you asked her she’d tell you nothing of all this
The way a thousand such small histories unfold
Everywhere
The same blind panic
Who can say what’s more horrifying
That no one remembers this night
Or that lovers draw blood because how can they not?
Vivienne has this sadness about her
That’s like a place you can’t quite find on a map
Cheaper cigarettes, whiskey bottles with slashed off labels, a cousin who knows a guy
Men who come and go
Mostly the latter
This was the world once
Briefly
And always
Something slightly murderous
In all these forms of beauty.
Just ask God.
For he so loved the world
James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (forthcoming, Alien Buddha Press, 2021,) as well as the founding Editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their work has appeared most recently in Cobra Milk Mag, Bear Creek Gazette and Resurrection Mag. They live in a far too cold and snowy upstate New York, where they are waiting patiently for the Spring.
This poem’s featured image was created by Alexandru Acea.